


Something Past and Whole

by Philosopher_King



Series: Angsty Zuko-centric Vignettes [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Fire Lord Zuko, Gen, Philosophy, Post-Canon, Zuko (Avatar)-centric, Zuko's Scar (Avatar)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-02-23 14:37:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23846269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: "Zuko was accumulating epithets, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it."His friends, naturally, all found it hilarious. They already delighted in poking fun at the titles of his office, calling him 'Your Fieriness' or 'Your Fire Lordship' or even, when Aang was feeling particularly obnoxious, 'Flamey-o, (Sifu) Hotlord!' The new epithets were just more titles for them to play around with and give him grief about."Zuko did not find them amusing. Not, as his friends all claimed, because he took himself too seriously and didn’t know how to laugh at himself! The problem with the epithets was that he found them morbid—as if the world was trying to write his epitaph before he'd even died."
Relationships: Aang & Zuko (Avatar), Zuko & His Legacy
Series: Angsty Zuko-centric Vignettes [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1718329
Comments: 22
Kudos: 534





	Something Past and Whole

> _What should win our gratitude._ — It was artists, and especially those of the theater, who first gave people eyes and ears to see and hear with pleasure what each one himself is, experiences, and wants; they first taught us to esteem the hero that is concealed in everyday characters; they first taught us the art of viewing ourselves as heroes—from a distance and, as it were, simplified and transfigured—the art of staging and watching ourselves. Only in this way can we come to terms with some base details in ourselves. Without this art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.
> 
> Perhaps one should concede a similar merit to the religion that made man see the sinfulness of every single individual through a magnifying glass, turning the sinner into a great, immortal criminal. By surrounding him with eternal perspectives, it taught man to see himself from a distance and as something past and whole.
> 
> —Friedrich Nietzsche, _The Gay Science_ section 78 (modified translation by W. Kaufmann)

Zuko was accumulating epithets, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it.

His friends, naturally, all found it hilarious. They already delighted in poking fun at the titles of his office, calling him ‘Your Fieriness’ or ‘Your Fire Lordship’ or even, when Aang was feeling particularly obnoxious, ‘Flamey-o, (Sifu) Hotlord!’ The new epithets were just more titles for them to play around with and give him grief about.

Zuko did not find them amusing. Not, as his friends all claimed (with varying degrees of tact), because he took himself too seriously and didn’t know how to laugh at himself! Well, maybe there was some truth to that charge… but the problem with the epithets was that he found them _morbid_ —as if the world was trying to write his epitaph before he’d even died. Trying to pin him down, to flatten him into a single static image, like a dried flower or a butterfly to be pressed into a book, catalogued alongside history’s other specimens of world rulers: Warlord Toz the Terrible, Earth King Wei the Fat, Earth Queen Jian the Just, General Chin the Conqueror, Fire Lord Sozin the Bloody, Princess Yue the Brave. Rival historians were already fighting over his father’s legacy: detractors (hoping to ingratiate themselves to the new Fire Lord) called him ‘The Phoenix King of Ashes’ or ‘The Phoenix Who Did Not Rise’; loyalists (who did not fear retaliation from a Fire Lord they thought too weak) called him ‘The Last Dragon’ and prayed for the return of the deposed Fire Lord Azula as ‘The Blue Phoenix.’

Of course, Zuko had already acquired a couple of epithets before his ascension to the throne: ‘The Banished Prince,’ or ‘The Disgraced Prince.’ Accurate enough, but too simple, too straightforward for the full truth of the matter. So too were the epithets he had gained since becoming Fire Lord, starting with the ones that Fire Sage Shyu had given him on the day of his coronation: ‘Zuko the Peacemaker’ and ‘Zuko the Restorer’—not only of his own honor, but of the honor of the whole Fire Nation, of its place in the community of nations, of balance among the nations.

Those were the official, government-approved descriptors; but Zuko heard himself being written into history in different ways, too, in reports from the network of spies that now answered to Ty Lee, or while stealing around the Capital in the guise of the Blue Spirit to listen at the windows of bars and gambling dens, lurking in the alleys near the late-night food stalls where carousers gathered and (importantly) talked. Some of these epithets were pedestrian and perfectly predictable: ‘Zuko the Burned’ or ‘The Burned Fire Lord’ were among the most common, and Zuko resigned himself to being remembered, like poor Wei the Fat, for his most noticeable physical characteristic.

Others, however, were more significant and telling of how his people viewed him. Some called him ‘The Avatar’s Fire Lord,’ ‘The Avatar’s Puppet,’ ‘The Avatar’s Pet.’ For surrendering the Fire Nation’s cause in the war without a fight, they called him ‘The Toothless Dragon’ or (in mocking reference to the temporary loss of his firebending) ‘The Dragon Without Fire.’ They jeered him as ‘Earth Lord,’ ‘Water Lord,’ or ‘Air Lord Zuko,’ depending on which nation he had just made some shameful concession to: evacuating the newer Earth Kingdom colonies; paying reparations to the Water Tribes; taking formal responsibility on behalf of his ancestor and his nation for the Air Nomad Genocide, denouncing as shameful slander the propaganda used to justify the slaughter, publicly abasing himself—on his knees with his forehead to the earth (as he had not lowered himself since he had apologized to his father for his disrespect and begged for his mercy)—and apologizing to Avatar Aang as the last survivor of his people. At their most blunt, Zuko’s own people called him ‘Zuko the Traitor’ and ‘Betrayer of his Nation.’

But not all of the epithets Zuko heard by spying on his subjects were so damning. Some sincerely used the titles Shyu had given him, Peacemaker and Restorer—spoke them with respect, gratitude, even reverence. There was a name he had first heard among Fire Nation migrants to Republic City, which had made its way back to the Fire Nation Capital to be spoken softly among his younger subjects (who barely remembered the years of the war, and had grown up with his account of things rather than Ozai’s or Azulon’s): not just ‘the Restorer,’ but ‘the Redeemer.’ Zuko hated that one even more than ‘Traitor’ or ‘Avatar’s Pet.’ He didn’t deserve it and could never live up to it; he knew he could only disappoint those who expected it of him. Better that they should call him ‘the Redeemed,’ but he could scarcely say he deserved that, either.

In the years since Zuko had raised Druk, he began hearing a few epithets he didn’t mind. ‘Zuko Dragon-tamer’ he considered inaccurate and insulting to his companion—did they think a dragon was a platypus-bear that one trained to do tricks?—but ‘Dragonrider’ was truthful enough and, he thought, had a nice ring to it. He preferred ‘Dragon-friend,’ in recognition of the honor and favor bestowed upon him by the Masters Ran and Shaw; but that one, unfortunately, had failed to catch on. His very favorite—the one he dared to hope might be the way history remembered him—he heard only three times over the space of a year, some thirty years after the war’s end… the year that Uncle Iroh died suddenly of no ailment anyone could identify. He could not tell just from hearing it whether it was ‘The Dragons’ Son’ or ‘The Dragon’s Son,’ but he liked to think it was somehow both.

Aang was teasing him about ‘Dragon-tamer’—“You should run off to join the circus like Ty Lee; I bet you’d look smashing in a ringmaster’s uniform!”—when Zuko finally managed to put words to what troubled him, instead of inarticulately spluttering his indignation. “I hate that they all want to make me into only one thing, wholly and completely, and ignore—or maybe deny—all the times I _haven’t_ been that thing, and all the other things I am, and have been, and might still be.”

Aang considered this. “Maybe you should think of them as like roles in a play—like theater masks that you can put on and take off.”

“Yes, because when we’ve been made into _dramatis personae_ in the past, it’s always been so flattering,” Zuko said, his voice dry and sharp as desert wind.

Aang laughed. “I’ve learned that sometimes it’s easier to just play ‘Savior of the World’ or ‘Wise Ancient World Spirit’ than to try to explain all you really are. And sometimes it’s fun to pretend that’s all you are, that everything is simpler than it is. Of course you have to take off the mask eventually… but _you_ know how fun it can be to wear it for a little while, and for a little while just be the Dragon Emperor or the Dark Water Spirit. Or is it the Blue Spirit?” he asked slyly.

“Easy enough for you to say, when you’re always cast as the hero. What if it’s the villain’s mask they want you to wear?” Half-consciously he put his fingers over his scar where it covered most of his cheek, then ran them up to the corner of the eye that was permanently narrowed, mask-like, into a threatening glare.

“I haven’t _always_ been the hero,” Aang said quietly. “And I’ve also learned that sometimes it’s easier to accept your role as the villain than to tie yourself in knots, and most likely break your back, trying to convince everyone to love you.”

“ _You’re_ one to talk,” Zuko retorted. “You can’t even stand to let Katara stay mad at you for an hour.”

Aang chucked ruefully at that. “Becoming a parent has changed my perspective somewhat.”

“And what is ruling a nation other than parenting an enormous family of unruly children…?”

“I didn’t say that, Your Fatherliness. I mean…”

“Very funny.”

“Aw, c’mon, Peacemaker. You know you can’t stay mad at me.”

“How could I, when I’m your faithful pet?”

“Who’s a good dragon…? Ouch, those were definitely teeth!”

“Don’t believe everything you hear about me… or read in history books.”

**Author's Note:**

> I've been accumulating so many angsty Zuko-centric vignettes that I had to give them their own series. You know there are more where these have been coming from...
> 
> Thanks to the folks on the Zutaraang Discord for inspiration and brainstorming assistance! I went gen with this idea, but it may well show up in shippy fics, too.
> 
> ETA 20 May: I keep fiddling with the translation of the Nietzsche quote because I'm not completely satisfied with the accuracy and I'm a huge dork.


End file.
